# Ch 5: Setup: VS Code, the Claude Code extension, cloning the AIOS template
Creator: Nate Herk (@nateherk)
Transcript of Nate Herk's 2h33m 'Build your own AI operating system' course, split into its chapters. All content and credit: Nate Herk (@nateherk), https://x.com/nateherk/status/2101656269056610682. Transcribed locally with faster-whisper; names may be misheard.

[0:21:00] some, a customer might ask me, then we're probably in a good spot to go ahead and get started. And if there's other things that come to mind when you sort of do that, you know, mental test, then just chuck it down into the right category. And once you get to a point where you feel good about what these tools look like now, what we need to do is we're going to get started building our AI OS. So the very first thing that I want you to do is go to my free Skool community. The link for that is down in the description and join this community. Your membership will get approved as quick as we can. And then once you're in here, you're going to go to the classroom and you're going to go to all YouTube resources and you're going to go in there and download the different resources for this video. You're going to need a GitHub repo and you're going to need, you know, those other docs that I talked about, but you need that to get started. And then we're going to be doing this inside of Claude code. And the way that I like to use Claude code is in VS code. You could also do the desktop app if you choose, but pretty much in all my YouTube videos, I like to use VS Code, and that's what we're gonna be using in today's tutorial. It's completely free to download. It is just an IDE, and then we're able to open up Claude Code inside of it. So I'm using VS Code today. Google Visual Studio Code, download it, and then the next step is you need to be able to connect to your Cloud account, and you do have to have a paid Cloud account in order to use Claude Code. You can do the 17 bucks a month plan, or I guess it would be 20 on monthly, but you can start here, and if you're hitting your limits really quick you want to scale up, then scale up. It's not a big deal. All right. So once you've done those two things, you're going to open up visual studio code and it will look like this. Now, what you're going to do first is you're going to install the Claude Code extension.

[0:22:30] So on this left-hand side, go over to this button, click on extensions, and then you're going to type in Claude Code. And once that pops up right here, you're basically just going to install this extension. Once you install that, it's going to prompt you to log in. And that is where you'll log in with your paid cloud subscription. Once you get that set up, you're going to see this button in the top right, which looks like Anthropics logo, and you're going to go ahead and just click on that. And what that does is it opens up this little Claude Code agent. And this is very similar to the way you would chat with Claude or chat GBT on the web. You know, you have a little chat box here, you can say hello, and this is going to call on Claude Opus 4.7, and it's going to respond to you. It's super simple. Now what we have to do is we have to open up a project to work in. So open up your file explorer, go to your desktop or your documents or wherever you you want to have your AIOS main folder and just create a new folder. Just call it AIOS or whatever you want and create that folder on your file explorer. And then you're gonna go up to this top left hand explore button and it says, you have not yet opened a folder. What you have to do is just open up that folder and that is basically our working directory or the project that we're working in right now. So you're gonna click on open folder and open up that one that you just created. So I just opened up one called AIOS demo. yours should look exactly like this because there's nothing yet in that folder. So all I'm going to do now is I'm going to close out of everything. I'm going to double click, open up Claude Code. And now what we have is on the right hand side, we have our agent. And on the left hand side, we have our files. So right now,

[0:24:00] obviously there are no files in here. And what you're going to do next is you're going to go to my free Skool community and you're going to grab the link to the GitHub repo. And you're going to grab the URL from it. And then you're just going to message Claude and you're going to say, Hey, can you clone this GitHub repo into this current project? It's going to go ahead and search the web for it and then it is going to pull it in and you're going to see a bunch of folders and files pop up on the left-hand side right here. It's going to ask you if it's okay to allow this command and you're just gonna go ahead and click yes, allow git clone. And what you can see is now that it has been cloned, we have a bunch of these different files over here. So you can see that we have a .cloud folder, we have a archives folder, we have a context folder, decisions folder, a references folder, and then we have all of these other files right down here. So let me real quick, take a second to familiarize with what we're actually looking at. The dot cloud folder. This is kind of like your overall project guide, I guess, dot cloud. What's in here right now is we only have a folder inside of this called skills, which is why we have this little breakdown. And this is basically where all of our skills are going to go in the future. Now, what is a skill? A skill is basically just something that gives you six arms. No, I'm just kidding. but it's basically a file inside of Claude Code and it's like a recipe. So let's say you had a skill for building a LinkedIn post or writing a LinkedIn post. What do you do every single time you wanna write a LinkedIn post? Maybe you do research and then you generate a graphic and then you write the copy and then you review it and then you post it. So how annoying would that be to explain every single time to Claude Code that you wanna do those five steps? When instead you could just package those into a skill